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Hong
Wai, a feminine literati painter
The
boudoir is the anteroom in which a young woman quietly sits before a
mirror,
adorning
and perfuming herself awaiting her love. The embodiment of that
moment,
the moment of embellishment, the moment of love is difficult to
captureHong
Wai’s paintings are in essence; about love.
Her
newest series of inks, Danielle, Anaïs, Elise, Doris, Emmanuelle,
Louise, Vanessa, are
like
so many fox spirits or ling hu, the femme fatale in Chinese fairy
tales, their
unembodied
apparitions in ink, evanescent and dreamlike.
To
paint the intimate clothing of women is to transgress a boundary in
ink painting,
almost
as taboo as to paint a nude.
For
centuries, the traditional ink has been limited to landscape and
calligraphy, the
attributes
of a Chinese gentleman, the Confucian literati or junshi. The
reluctance of
painting
nudes comes perhaps as Francois Jullien, the French philosopher has
suggested
from the reluctance to paint subjects a such or figures; the Chinese
gentleman
or gentlewoman preferring to paint the world itself. The Buddhist and
Taoist
philosophy behind ink painting has always valued the suggestion more
than
the
depiction, the essence more than the body, the spirit more than the
incarnation.
The
ink “nudes” of Hong Wai (if we can call them nudes) are still in
this regard
very
much in the literati tradition. They do not depict, but suggest. The
body is still
unpainted,
only inferred. The head, figure, arms, hands of the subject are not
apparent.
The
lingerie with its floating gauze, its lacy veils, gives the work
movement. The
body
seems to take shape behind the layers of lace, which have been
painted with a
tiny
brush. In contrast, the ink blotch effect or xuanran gives the effect
of a
landscape
with clouds or pools of water; adding to the ethereal, floating
atmosphere.
The
running ink, yunxing youmo, like threads of the embroidered garments,
adds to
this
movement and evokes a body, one that might even be swirling, dancing
or
floating.
The woman, like the fox spirit, seems alive. But she is indefinable,
ineffable.
Ink
has been confined for generations to a masculine universe. Here, Hong
Wai
journeys
with ink to a new frontier, that of the mysterious feminine. The
mountain
and
river landscape has become instead a woman’s body. The ode to
heaven and
earth
has become an ode to the sensuous, the hidden, the ineluctable yin.
The
pine branches and fern landscape of Vanessa, the roses and cloud
landscape of
Louise (which seems to be full of hidden, voluptuous bodies); the
buds and
blossoms
of Anaïs leading to an avalanche of ink and water clouds, the
cascades of
leaves
of Danielle’s opera-like kimono, all of these women seem in their
own way to be landscapes. One can even glimpse a hidden dragon
and cloud motif in Elise,
somehow
indefinable, yet very ancient, extremely Oriental.
It
reminds me ever so slightly of Pan Yuliang, an earlier 20th-century
woman
painter
of nudes who lived in Paris. Pan rarely painted her “nudes”
without
clothing,
portraying an open kimono, or a throw over a chaise longue which she
inevitably
decorated with flowers, leaves or other landscape motifs. Her nudes
almost
always appeared in their own secret gardens, their flesh complimented
by
the
richness of the background or their adornment. Hong Wai’s ink
creations are
also
their own jardin secrets, replete with sensuality.
In
the Tang dynasty, courtesans such as Yu Xuanji and Xue Tao employed
all charms
to entice their lovers. Gold hairpins, jade ornaments, woven silk
gauze garments,
nothing was too precious to lure secret love. The courtesan powdered her
face, darkened her eyebrows and painted them into moons, into the
shape of moths
or flower blossoms, and covered them in gold and feathers. They then composed
poems to entice; verses to bewitch.
These
love poems, were subtle hints at seduction, and eventual trysts. The
poetry often
referred to clothing, the “silver hooks” hinting at their amorous
alliances, their
silken robes alluding to their femininity and seclusion; the robes
hiding her innermost
sentiments and shielding her from the harshness of the world. As Yu Xuanji
wrote:
Shamed
before the sun, I shade myself with my netted gauze silk sleeve;
Depressed
by the spring, reluctant to rise and put on makeup,
It’s
easy to find a priceless treasure,
Much
harder to get a man with a heart.
Perhaps
Hong Wai’s works are part of a deeper love poem. For the details in
her work,
the lace, she uses the same brush as was often used for writing: a
tiny, intricate
wolf brush, which could equally have been used for writing poems or
love letters.
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